World of Mushrooms

These months of social distancing have brought the beginning of the rainy season here in Costa Rica. We have shifted our hiking times, depending on when the thunderclouds form and the mist turns to larger drops. Our walks in the cloud forest between storms reveal new treasures every time. There is an abundance of mushrooms around us.

Among all the scientists who are in their element here, we have not come across a mycologist. How delightful it is to ask questions of a botanist, an ornithologist, a tropical ecologist, an entomologist eager to name a creature or explain its behavior. Why is this forest not crawling with fungus fanatics? We have a butterfly garden, a herpetarium, a frog museum… but no mushroom spectacle other than nature’s own. Alia is considering obtaining some specialization and enlightening the world about the wonder of the hongos, but we’ll have a few years to wait. In the meantime, we marvel at the beauty of these little beings.

I find it valuable to contemplate mushrooms during this time. Up from fallen trees they grow, out from under carpets of dead leaves, they blanket decomposing logs.

Where something expired, could no longer endure, succumbed to death, up they come.

Where all appeared done and gone, these bursts of color rise.

When even the fungi begin to fade, their spores live on below the surface, dormant until the rot invites their reappearance. They cycle from visible to invisible to visible again.

When this virus is no longer so present, what understanding will we have gained about the next one that emerges? And about ourselves?

When today’s protests quiet and the streets are empty, what will we have planted that will not go away?

How can we understand death? How does it move us? How do we grow from what it leaves behind?

We find happiness on a visit to the world of mushrooms.